1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medicine dispensing device, and more particularly, to a medicine dispensing device that is capable of accurately dispensing medicines based on a medicine dispensing request (for example, a prescription for a patient).
2. Discussion of Related Art
In general, medicines having various types and shapes may be included among medicines for a one-time dosage based on a prescription for a patient, and the medicines for a one-time dosage are put in a basket and transferred to the patient.
Various medicines to be put in one basket are collected from boxes storing the respective medicines into one basket according to types and the number of medicines indicated in a patient's prescription. The basket in which the medicines are collected is transferred to the patient, and the patient takes the medicines collected in the basket.
According to the related art, when various medicines are collected in one basket, a medicine specialist, such as a pharmacist, needs to manually take the medicines out of each vial storing the medicines, and put the medicines into the basket based on a patient's prescription. Thus, an identification task of reverifying collected medicines is necessary.
This also entails a certain risk of medicine-related emergencies due to the difficulty of guaranteeing accurate administration of medicines. On top of this risk, it also takes a long time to collect medicines based on a patient's prescription due to the complexity of the medicine collecting procedure, which results in low work efficiency.
For these reasons, research on automatically collecting various medicines from boxes storing the medicines is constantly being performed. However, there have been difficulties so far in providing accuracy and efficiency in medicine collecting, and thus convenience has not been able to be provided to users such as pharmacists.